‘This is a lethal threat’: Indigenous groups fear Bolsonaro’s hold on voters in Brazil’s Amazon towns

It was the night before the first round of Brazil’s presidential election and Rosimari Monteiro was so excited she couldn’t sleep. The 38-year-old spent hours tossing and turning at her home in the Amazon town of Mucajaí before rising at dawn to cast her vote.

“I was the first person to vote at my polling station … I voted 22, so we got off to a positive start,” recalls Monteiro, as she stands in her sitting room with her two young daughters.

Twenty-two is the number Brazil’s electronic voting system uses to identify the far-right candidate Flávio Bolsonaro, who is hoping to beat the leftwing incumbent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, in this year’s election.

“To us, he represents the future. We want a light at the end of the tunnel. We want a better future for ourselves and for our kids, who are the future of our nation,” enthuses Monteiro, who was far from the only person in Mucajaí to vote Bolsonaro.

In fact, this sun-baked roadside settlement is where Bolsonaro secured his biggest proportional victory in Roraima, the northern state where the would-be president also registered his best nationwide result. Nearly 79% of 11,734 votes in Mucajaí went to Bolsonaro.

Monteiro gave several reasons for her decision, including Bolsonaro’s pledges to fight crime and create jobs. But one issue explains why the son of the disgraced former president Jair Bolsonaro is so popular here and across Roraima, where 14 of 15 municipalities backed the far-right politician.

Mucajaí was the launchpad for much of the illegal gold rush in which tens of thousands of miners invaded the nearby Yanomami Indigenous territory during Jair Bolsonaro’s environmentally calamitous 2019-2022 presidency. Prospectors used the meandering Mucajaí River to sneak into those protected Indigenous lands near the border with Venezuela, bringing malaria, mercury poisoning, hunger and destruction to its 32,000 Indigenous people. Ranches carved out of Mucajaí’s rainforests conceal clandestine airstrips from which helicopters and planes ferried supplies, miners and sex workers into jungles that the Yanomami’s ancestors are thought to have occupied for at least 1,000 years.

When Lula beat Bolsonaro’s father in the 2022 election, the leftwinger launched a crackdown to evict those miners and cripple a multi-billion dollar illegal industry he blamed for a “genocide” against the Yanomami. A broader environmental offensive across the Amazon cut deforestation to its lowest levels since the late 80s.

Now, nearly four years later, Mucajaí’s electorate hopes a Bolsonaro victory in Sunday’s second round runoff will end that clampdown and allow the 21st century gold rush to resume. “The closure of the mines brought complete penury. It became really hard to find jobs,” complains Monteiro, a driving instructor whose brother-in-law worked in the mines.

Like many people in the area, Monteiro believes that, if elected, Bolsonaro will move to legalise mining on Indigenous lands “so people can get back to work”. Speaking in the Amazon on Tuesday, Bolsonaro vowed to be a president “who will turn the riches God has given us into riches for every single one of you”, adding: “Lula couldn’t give a shit about the Amazon.”

The prospect of a second Bolsonaro presidency has caused panic among Indigenous leaders and conservationists – here in Roraima, and all over the Amazon. From January, when the new president takes power, at least seven of the nine Amazon states, including Roraima, will have pro-Bolsonaro governors. Congress will feature a record number of rightwing politicians hostile to Indigenous rights and environmental issues.

“By voting 22, Brazilians are signing a death certificate for the Yanomami, and Indigenous people in general,” says the Yanomami leader Júnior Hekurari, 40, who was on the frontline of efforts to protect his people during the humanitarian crisis that unfolded under Bolsonaro.

Already, Hekurari sees signs the miners are again preparing to flood Brazil’s biggest Indigenous territory. In the days after the 4 October first round, which Bolsonaro won by 47% to Lula’s 45.1%, Yanomami villagers reported receiving calls from illegal prospectors ordering them to clear remote runways so they could return.

Nilton Tubino, who has led Lula’s anti-mining crusade since 2023, says “strange movements” have been detected on the outskirts of the territory, reinforcing suspicions miners are gearing up to pillage precious metals and tin ore used to make mobile phones.

Tubino, who calls Mucajaí the “nerve centre” of the illegal trade, believes Lula can recover from his first-round loss. “The election isn’t over until it’s over,” says Tubino.

But speaking at his group’s headquarters in Roraima’s capital, Boa Vista, Tubino admits his unit will close if Bolsonaro prevails. He fears environmental and Indigenous protection officials who have led Lula’s crackdown will be sidelined and persecuted, as happened under Jair Bolsonaro, who is serving a 27-year sentence for plotting a coup after the 2022 election. The consequences for the Yanomami will be dire.

“This is a lethal threat … to the very existence of these people, to their culture and cosmovision, and way of life,” Lula’s former environment minister, Marina Silva, has warned.

Gold mining is not the only reason Roraima’s voters back Bolsonaro, a 45-year-old evangelical Christian twice baptised in the Jordan River. The evangelical church’s rapid advance into the Amazon has also bolstered support, with prosperity theology striking a chord among those on Brazil’s fast-growing agricultural frontier.

Leandro Gentil, a political activist and pastor in Boa Vista, considers Bolsonaro a champion of the Christian values his church fights “tooth and nail” to defend. “Bolsonaro is practically a unanimity within our congregation … He’s the fresh oxygen we need to breathe,” Gentil adds, citing the politician’s opposition to same-sex marriage, abortion and drugs.

Similar views are heard in Mucajaí, where small evangelical temples are found on most streets.

Marinalva Ferreira Barbosa, a 40-year-old cleaner who worships at a local branch of the powerful Assemblies of God church, says she opposes Lula because he champions “things forbidden by the Bible”. “Like men getting with men, women with women – this kind of filth,” adds Barbosa, who works in the Paradise Pousada, a 15-room hotel that, because of the mining crackdown, is empty.

Bolsonaro’s hardline pledge to eliminate “narco-terrorists” – despite his own well-documented ties to members of Rio’s underworld – has also seduced voters in the Amazon, where organised crime groups are tightening their grip.

“Drugs could destroy our future,” says Bolsonaro activist Luciano Gomes, as he stares out across Mucajaí from a tourist view point. Several of the rundown streets below are scrawled with graffiti celebrating Brazil’s biggest criminal organisation, the PCC, or threatening to shoot rivals from the Red Command gang dead.

But Gomes’s main reason for supporting Bolsonaro is his desire for mining to be unleashed. “Our state has a wealth of mineral resources … gold, diamonds and rare earths that were discovered recently,” he says, insisting they can be exploited responsibly. “Bolsonaro champions the idea that miners aren’t crooks, they’re workers.”

On Sunday, Gomes will return to the polls to vote “22”, sporting a garish shirt emblazoned with images of the Bolsonaros and their ally, the US president, Donald Trump.

If Bolsonaro triumphs, Gomes will lead a procession of cars draped in Brazil and US flags 50 miles north to Boa Vista, to attend an all-night shindig in a square centred around the statue of a gold panner.

The most famous Yanomami leader, Davi Kopenawa, has other ideas. “I’m going to vote for my friend Lula … The Lula government is a friend of the native peoples,” says Kopenawa, 70, warning of conflict and resistance if Bolsonaro wins.

“There will be a war between Indigenous people and non-Indigenous people. Violence, death, bloodshed,” predicts Kopenawa’s 44-year-old son, Dário, whose association’s offices in Boa Vista resemble a prison, encircled by high walls, security cameras and an electric fence to guard against attacks.

One recent evening, scores of students and Indigenous activists hit Boa Vista’s streets to denounce Bolsonaro’s plans. Among them is Joênia Wapichana, a lawyer and politician who ran the Indigenous protection service, Funai, under Lula.

“Roraima isn’t the back yard of bolsonarismo,” says Wapichana, 53, who insisted that Indigenous communities will not give up without a fight.

“No people in Brazil are more resilient than the Indigenous people … that’s why in 2026 we still exist,” Wapichana says. “We are born fighting, we are born resisting.”